I could see the writing on the wall last week, but after about 20 hours I've dropped Dragon's Dogma 2. Exploration felt just like a chore to me, and combat was super boring. This is definitely one of those games, where I absolutely don't see what reviewers saw in it to give out such high scores and maybe even call it GotY. From what I've read, the online discourse has shifted a little as well, and not just because of the bad performance or microtransactions.
I tried switching over to Horizon Forbidden West, and was going through the first small zone, when the game started crashing constantly with no error or hint on what the problem could be. It was weird, because it ran smoothly for almost 10 hours, and then it became basically unplayable. Crashes every 1–5 minutes. I tried a lot of things, but nothing helped, and was close to giving up. Then one or two days ago I had a breakthrough and I think I found the cause, something with the textures or my GPU memory. First, I reduced the memory OC of my GPU, which I haven't changed in almost 2 years, although it still crashed after an hour, which was definitely an improvement. Then I turned down the Texture Quality setting from Very High to High, I was finally able to play with no issues again. Today I'll check with my normal overclock again, if it's just the in-game setting or both.
As for the game itself, I like it, it's basically Assassin's Creed Valhalla or something, just that controlling Aloy doesn't feel like you're moving through molasses. I don't play these open world RPGs where you're basically checking off markers on the map too often, but I do enjoy them from time to time. Because of all the problems I had with the game, I just made it out of the prologue / introduction or whatever (before you get to the titular Forbidden West), so I can't say too much about it yet, however I gotta say it does look fantastic, probably the best looking game (on a technical level) that I've played.
I also played the new stuff, that was released in the first big patch of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. The new zone is really neat and I had a good time.
Then I tried Halls of Torment, another Vampire Survivors-type game. I love the look and vibe while playing, but it feels like you have to grind the early levels somewhat for upgrades and stuff until you're ready for the later stages, which I'm not really a fan of. For now, I've shelved it, but will definitely check it out again later.
I gave Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors another chance as well, this time on my desktop PC, since I didn't have a great time on my Steam Deck before. The game just loves throwing ranged enemies at you, so your screen is constantly filled with projectiles, which is just not fun, and the bigger screen only helps a tiny bit. It also seems super grindy, since there is sooooo much stuff to unlock and upgrade, although basically everything are just tiny passive improvements. Not really sure how I feel about it yet, but it's another game, which I'll check out again at a later time.
Wow. This is something I have never heard of before but it conceptually makes sense albeit I am a have no idea how long a tank would run a train for. Would love to learn more too, so please link is to whatever it is your are creating. Hoping a video on the topic.
Thanks! So far that site seems to be the best source of information I’ve been able to find (the Wikipedia article seems to mostly be a restated, trimmed down version of it) but there are a few other articles online I’m trying to vet for accuracy.
I’m especially interested in this quote:
“A fireless soda engine, together with evaporating apparatus, has been at work on the Aix la Chapelle-Burtscheid tramway for the last half year. In order to test the working capacity of this locomotive engine, and the consumption of fuel on a certain day, the Honigmann locomotive engine was put to work this day from 8:45 o’clock am till 8 o’clock pm, with a pause of three-quarters of an hour for the second quantity of soda lye. The engine was, therefore, at work for fully 10� hours, viz, 5� hours with the first quantity, and five with the second. The distance between Heinrichsalle and Wilhelmstrasse, where the engine performed the regular service, is 1 km, […] This distance was traversed sixty-four times, the total distance, including the journeys to the station, being 66 km.”
So it sounds like it ran for about five hours and traveled 33km on its load of caustic soda (I’m not sure at a glance which flavor chemical) and only took 45 minutes to refuel and come back up to temp.
And these were early designs, basically prototypes (though granted, the folks in that time making them probably knew a ton about steam locomotives). I imagine they could have been improved with time to study and refine the designs.
I’m not sure how well the boilers stood up to containing hot caustic stuff, but perhaps materials science has developed enough to help protect against that.
I’m writing and making visual art in the solarpunk genre, which tends to heavily emphasize trains and other public transit. But I want to broaden our options a bit beyond just electric trains. When I first heard about these, I felt like they’d mix super well with another invention of that time period, the mirrored solar concentrators used to run steam generators (some of the earliest solar power).
After all, one of the biggest disadvantages of the caustic soda locomotives was that it took more coal to dry the soda than to produce an equivalent amount steam directly with coal. But you don’t have to use coal. These 1800s mirrored dishes only require mirrors or polished metal and math to make (plus some simple motors and electronics to get them to follow the sun) and they could dry the soda for free. A lot of my focus is on less utopian, rebuilding societies, so trains and solar concentrators built with 1800s technology seems like a good place to start.
I’m going to start with a picture of a stop along the tracks for replenishing the soda in this style
plus a description. And I’m hoping to work them into a fiction story and a tabletop campaign.
As for the technical side, I’m not sure on whether they’ll be draining the diluted caustic soda and pouring in fresh, whether they’ll be drying it inside the locomotive’s boiler using superheated steam generated with a solar boiler besides the tracks, perhaps swapping locomotives to avoid delays, or even swapping boilers as someone on reddit suggested. If I go with swapping the soda, probably the boiler tank won’t actually be inside the dish, but nearby, with the steam from the dish heating it.
I hope that helps, I’m very new to this technology and am already trying to mix it with other stuff so we’ll see how it goes.
Considering that most of the descriptions I’ve seen of drying the caustic soda mention pumping superheated steam through it, and that almost any of these systems, or something like these modern ones could produce that, there’s probably lots of ways to match these trains to analog solar power.
Oh wow. What a great reply and a super cool project you are working on. You have inspired me too as one of the attractions in my VR Theme Park I am Imagineering is about trains and I would love to add a foot note about these. Thanks so much.
I have that and also MC:LA for the PS3. I recently learned that Rockstar never officially ported MC:LA to the PC so the only official ways to play it are on the PS3 and 360. And sadly RPCS3 still needs more optimization before it’s playable. I get about 15-30 fps whenever I try it.
I am currently playing through midnight club Los Angeles on RPCS3 on Ubuntu 22.04.
I would say it is about 70 to 90% stable. There are certain areas of the map that load it lower frame rates. Certain updates of RPCS3 have seem to affect this. Perhaps I should be more actively communicating in their community.
I am right now running a particular build of RPCS3 for midnight club LA.
0.0.31-16277 (from 4-1-24)
I’d say it’s about 85-90% stable. Totally playable ehat promoted this whole thread.
I’ll take your word for it, but no arcade racing game will ever be as fun as the old Burnout games (mainly 3 and Revenge). Certainly not 100% hits though…
Postal 2. The game mechanics and open-world flexibility have aged amazingly well, it’s still very funny, and I love the way the game’s level of violence firmly depends on the player’s actions.
Plus the Postal Dude’s petition to make whiney congressmen play violent video games is needed more than ever.
On Android I miss Spaghetti & Marshmallows, where you had to build towers out of said materials. That was a wonderful game with great physics but sadly only runs on very old phones.
Man I WANT to love Horizon. It seems exactly like my type of game. But everytime I play it everything feels… insincere? Idk something about it doesnt hit. Still paid for it day one when it came to PC though to support the cross platform Sony initiative.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. The tutorial sections did absolutely put me off the first time, but I saw flashes of brilliance after I got over that hump. Definitely gonna give it another go after the Helldivers rush wears off.
My problem is that i can’t seem to get a hang of the combat, at all. Taking down even some medium sized dinobots feels like a slog, 20 minutes of me breaking line of sight, taking a pot shot at its weak point, and somehow missing, rinse and repeat. I feel the game either didn’t do a good job teaching me how to deal with them, or I’m just playing it wrong and don’t know better.
I’ve started the game three times and each time I get about 6 hours in before I get bored.
Not sure exactly how much this fits the bill for you but Kena: Bridge of Spirits may be what you’re looking for. I personally describe it as a Pixar game with Souls-ish combat.
I mean I love Kena, but it’s more a game comparable to other classical action-adventures such as the Zelda games, not Dark Souls as it places very little focus on accurate dodging and judging when not to dodge, plus it has no gameplay loop built around repeated death.
I have no idea how I’m not bored yet. They’re all just so damn satisfying to play. I went from mostly online FPS to these games after I got Prepare to Die Edition back in the day. Any given time I play a game now, there’s an 80% chance it’s one of these or something similar to them (like The Surge, Mortal Shell, Lies of P, etc).
Don’t Starve ticks pretty much all the boxes for a game that I should like…but I just don’t.
I like a number of action roguelikes, like The Binding of Isaac.
I like the open-world nature.
But the game just doesn’t do it for me. I dunno. I guess that a lot of the gameplay is clicking on things to gather them, which I am not that blown away by. I don’t feel like I change things up much based on what the world throws at me, which I think is an important aspect for a roguelite/roguelike to have. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead does a better job of this, The Binding of Isaac a much better. I think that the low-sanity graphical artifacts might build mood, but are obnoxious.
Genre mismatch might be a factor? Don't Starve is not an action-roguelite like Binding of Isaac; it's a survival-crafting game. They are aiming to be vastly different experiences.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker. If anything, it's long. I though about doing replays with other character types, but its long campaign has me tired of going through it again any time soon and I still have a chapter to go. Whenever that starts. I'll probably finish it next weekend if i have time.
I loved that game, and completed it twice, but the last chapter (or last 2 chapters - depending on which ending you get) is super annoying. The encounters are repetitive, and there are quite a lot of them. It’s almost the same group of enemies again, and again, and again. Once you have a working strategy those encounters aren’t even that challenging, but if you play turn-based, they take a lot of time…
You know, if I had millions lying around I’d want to build or buy a small <10km line in rural buttfuck Saskatchewan and ride train cars around, just for myself and letting people that made it here use it for fun. I haven’t tried estimating how much that would cost.
Have a look at the West Coast Express, opened in 1995 from Vancouver BC to 43 miles out at an estimated cost of 40 to 80 million Canadian dollars, equivalent to 53.4 to 106.8 million of today’s USD. There were musings of it as far back as 1971, but it sounds like design started sometime after 1981 and construction started in 1994, finishing late 1995.
The price tag would include 5 engines and 5 sets of bilevel railcars, leasing tracks for CP and BNSF, building a handful of turnouts and sidings to hold the trains when out of service, build or contracting wash and maintenance facilities, maybe some small track and signalling upgrades along the route, and station facilities in 7 places.
Another example is the Rail Runner Express in New Mexico that runs 96.5 miles from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. The NM Governor Richardson announced it in August 2003. Construction began in October 2005. The first portion of service began in July 2006 and the full line went into service by December 2008. The cost to build the line was about 285 million USD total equivalent to about 438 million USD today. A operational deficit of 10 to 20 million USD annually was reported and criticized, but roads and bridges of that length cost as much to maintain anyway.
bin.pol.social
Ważne